IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/cup/jwecon/v20y2025i4p348-370_4.html

Expertise, accuracy, and reputation inflation in the wine market: Evidence from Vivino ratings

Author

Listed:
  • Janssen, Rebecca
  • Ribar, Matthew K.

Abstract

Review systems, including quantitative measures as well as text-based expression of experiences, are omnipresent in today's digital platform economy. This paper studies the existence of reputation inflation, i.e., unjustified increases in ratings, with a special focus of heterogeneity between experienced and non-experienced users. Using data on more than 5 million reviews from an online wine platform we compare consistency between numerical feedback and textual reviews as well as sentiment measures. Overall the wine platform displays strongly increasing numerical feedback over our time period from 2014 to 2020 while the scores predicted by reviewers’ written feedback remain constant. This difference is consistent across both expert and non-expert reviewers. Online platforms as well as potential customers should be aware of the phenomenon of reputation inflation and simplifying feedback to one number might do a disservice to review platforms’ goal of providing a representative quality assessment.

Suggested Citation

  • Janssen, Rebecca & Ribar, Matthew K., 2025. "Expertise, accuracy, and reputation inflation in the wine market: Evidence from Vivino ratings," Journal of Wine Economics, Cambridge University Press, vol. 20(4), pages 348-370, November.
    • Handle: RePEc:cup:jwecon:v:20:y:2025:i:4:p:348-370_4
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.cambridge.org/core/product/identifier/S1931436125100904/type/journal_article
    File Function: link to article abstract page
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:cup:jwecon:v:20:y:2025:i:4:p:348-370_4. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Kirk Stebbing (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.cambridge.org/jwe .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.